Teach a Girl, Change the World

"I didn't have a clue about how to build a school. So what did I do first, Amira?" He hands the microphone to his daughter, standing beside him in a Pennies for Peace T-shirt and jeans, totally comfortable with being part of a tag team performance. "You wrote to 580 celebrities," she says, "and you got only one answer." A $100 check arrived from newscaster Tom Brokaw, a fellow alumnus of the University of South Dakota, where Mortenson earned degrees in nursing and chemistry.

To raise money, Mortenson worked double shifts as a nurse, and briefly lived in his car. Two more crucial donations set him on his way. First, physicist Jean Hoerni, an early developer of the microchip and a mountain climber, heard about Mortenson's quest and offered enough to buy building supplies for the school; later he would provide seed money for CAI. And then, Amira tells the assembled students, kids just like them pitched in. In the spring of 1995, Mortenson visited Westside Elementary School in River Falls, WI, where his mother, Jerene Mortenson, was principal. When he described the children of Korphe writing in the dirt, one fourth grader offered to break open his piggy bank. He and everyone else at Westside went on to collect 62,345 pennies for the school, and Pennies for Peace was born. "You might think a penny isn't worth anything," Amira says to her rapt middle school audience. "But one penny can buy a pencil for a kid in Pakistan or Afghanistan. A few more pennies can buy paper and books. And 100 pennies can pay a teacher's salary for a day."

The Korphe school opened in the summer of 1997, after a series of frustrating delays. A local proverb helped Mortenson summon patience, he tells the students, and shaped his philosophy of philanthropy. "Haji Ali, the village chief and my mentor, told me, 'Here we say, Take the time to have three cups of tea. The first cup you're a stranger, the second cup you're a friend, the third cup you're family.'" Mortenson's interpretation: The best way to help people is to slow down, listen carefully to what they want instead of imposing your ideas on them, and make them equal partners in the enterprise. Patience and consensus-building have paid off: "In the village of Chunda, Pakistan, it took us eight years and thousands of cups of tea to convince the religious leader to allow one girl to go to school," he says. "When the Chunda Girls' School opened in 2007, there were 74 girls enrolled  and now there are almost 300."

Amira has visited Pakistan three times with her parents  always in extremely safe areas, she notes. "Over there, going to school is a privilege," she tells the New Jersey students. "Who here doesn't like getting out of bed and going to school in the morning?" Hands shoot up. "I don't, either. But over there, the kids wake up at four in the morning, do their chores, like herding goats and yaks, and then they walk sometimes two miles to get to school. My biggest heroes are the girls in Afghanistan, because they go through so much for the chance to have an education."

Some risk their lives. Since 2007, the Taliban and other militant groups have bombed, destroyed, or shut down more than 500 schools in Afghanistan and more than 200 schools in Pakistan, nearly all of them educating girls. Young women are warned to stay away from classes or be shot. An empty Afghan girls' school was blown up the week of this assembly. But only one CAI school has been attacked. "The main reason is that our schools have so much local community support," Mortenson says. CAI schools are always a partnership: Mortenson waits to be invited by a village, then involves community members, including clerics, in every stage of planning and building. Local residents match CAI funds with donated labor and resources, and they help run the school. "Our best security is the relationships we have with local community elders," Mortenson says. At the one CAI school in Afghanistan that was closed by Taliban gunmen, the local militia leader, who has two daughters in another school, brought 100 of his men to battle the Taliban, and reopened the school two days later, leaving behind 12 armed guards.

There's another proverb Mortenson loves to quote, one he learned growing up in Tanzania, where he spent the first 14 years of his life with his parents and three younger sisters. His late father, Irvin Mortenson, founded a teaching hospital there, and his mother started a school. Mortenson credits them with his enthusiasm for education and public service. "In Africa, they say, 'Educate a boy and you educate an individual. Educate a girl and you educate a community.'"

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